27 



completion of the works required for the purpose, in the Alps, the Cevennes and the 

 Pyrenees would cosjfc 148 millions of francs in works and 72 more to acquire land, or 

 a total of nine millions sterling. 



The rapid slope of Dauphiny and Provence from the mountains to the sea, and their 

 warm climate causing sudden heavy rains, naturally expose these provinces to torrential 

 action. At first the clearing of woodland proceeded so slowly that for centuries neither 

 the want of timber nor torrential evils were seriously felt. Throughout the middle ages 

 the country remained well wooded and famed for its fertility, both in the lowlands and the 

 hills. Even so late as 1789, Arthur Young writes that " about Barcelonette and in the 

 highest parts of the mountains, the hill pastures feed a million sheep, besides large herds 

 of cattle," and he adds " with such a soil and such a climate, we are not to suppose a 

 country barren because it is mountainous. The valleys I have visited are in general 

 beautiful." Other contemporary writers and local tradition agree in showing that a 

 century ago the ravages of torrents in Provence and Dauphiny were still too insignificant 

 to deserve notice. Some portions of the same province have since become ruined and 

 depopulated through this cause. Out of a total area of 1,710,000 acres, the department 

 of the Lower Alps possessed, in 1852, 245,000 acres of cultivated land, against only 183,000 

 in 1862, the difference of 62,000 acres having been swept away by torrents during the 

 interval of ten years. In the same interval the population decreased by 7,500. Between 

 1846 and 1876 there are no data of the extent of cultivation destroyed, but the popula- 

 tion decreased from 157,000 to 136,000. In the department of the High Alps, the 

 population, that had increased by 11,000 from 1805 to 1840, decreased during the next 

 thirty years from 130,500 to 119,000 in 1876. Not only has much of the land of both 

 departments been rendered absolutely barren, but villages in the torrent basins have also 

 been engulfed, crumbling away with the ground, and roads and bridges destroyed fre- 

 quently. Many forcible pictures have been drawn of tho state of degradation which the 

 country had reached towards the middle of the present century. And yet, within the 

 memory of the same generation, those bare hill-sides that stood parched and desolate, 

 cut up to the rock by networks of ravines, had been many of them covered with fine 

 forests and without a single torrent. The destruction had proceeded at such a continually 

 increasing rate that, quoting the words of an official report in 1853, " unless prompt 

 energetic measures are taken, the time may be reckoned when the French Alps will have 



become nothing but a desert waste Each year will aggravate the evil, and 



in half a century, there will be in France a few ruins more and a department less." It 

 became a question whether the Alps should be reclaimed or given up to the ever en- 

 croaching torrents ; which ended in laws being passed in 1860 and 1864, prescribing the 

 extensive works of restauration on which millions have already been spent. 



The influence of vegetation on the flow of water suggested an efficacious remedy. It 

 has been found, beyond question, that (a) the presence of forest on a soil prevents the 



